What with Google giving preferential treatment to websites that display well on smartphones, likely because at least half of all website visitors are not using PC's, I assume you have gone to the trouble to upgrade or update your business website to be what's called "responsive". That simply means that your site is designed to resize and reflow items so that they view equally well on desktops, tablets, and phones. You have been able to view websites on phones for years, but until recently doing so involved a lot of panning left and right and zooming in and out to get things practically readable, particularly those of us with older eyes. Most modern affordable website hosts providing attractive, easy-to-use drag-and-drop website editors like those at weebly.com and wix.com create responsive sites automatically from your desktop site.

If your website already looks good on a phone, why bother with an app? if your site is such that you get a fair amount of visitors or frequent users, you can create an additional income stream from either charging for your app or by displaying hopefully unobtrusive ads.

Unfortunately, I mostly found the dedicated "app builder" services to be more expensive than even the better website builders that provided much more functionality to their customers, particularly since most of the work was already done by the website builders in creating a responsive site. I did find one easy-to-use free site at appsgeyser.com and converted my website as a test case in less than ten minutes. You can find the links to download my Android app on my homepage or by scanning the QR code or by clicking here. Unfortunately, I've read that the Apple Store will not accept just a simple clone of your website.

If your small business only sells a handful of items on your website, you do not really need to pay your host's typical $20 monthly upgrade charge for their optional "shopping cart" software. PayPal let's you create various buttons, e.g., buy now, add to cart, subscribe, donate, checkout, that provide basic shopping cart features for free. That is, you can allow users to select colors, or sizes, as well as shipping choices by simply copying and pasting some code from PayPal's website onto your website pages. They offer various customizing options, so do not think that you are just limited to a button that only transfer funds.

To access these features, just go to PayPal and either upgrade your personal account or create a free business account. Click on the "tools" menu item at the top of your account's home page, and select PayPal buttons to get started.

And, yes, I am as guilty as the next. In particular, blogs that lack any recent postings send at least two messages. First, you have probably gone out of business but haven't run out of your current website hosting contract. Or, you are too busy to bother with trying to help your customers unless they want to buy something. Either message is very damaging to your small business.

Author

I developed large-scale systems, both commercial and aerospace, for 40+ years. There were lessons learned, but the joy of successes more than offset a few pains. Hopefully, my experienced counsel will help yours be mostly fun.Now, I'm often golfing and riding my bike as seen above. I'm the handsome dude in the brown leather jacket near the middle.

The book "Managing Systems - Development 101" by James T. Karam is written with the engineer's perspective in mind, specifically targeted towards those technical types who find themselves advancing into positions requiring managerial and oversight responsibilities, in addition to their technical expertise.As a specific technical type moving more into a managerial role myself, I found the book an easy read (being only 111 pages or so), but dense, in the sense that there are a lot of benchmark figures and information that are hard to assimilate in one simple reading. I'll be using this book as reference in the future.Duane A. Kaufman, 2010

This is great outline of succinct take-home messages. The subject material is timeless, and as new systems evolve, the advice from this author will remain relevant.Francha Barker, 2013